I was just reading Chromium Blog and it just announced: WebGL Spec Initial Public Draft Released. Well, I was quite surprised at half way to the post when I noticed they mentioned that one of the show cases a port of my San Angeles Observation 4 KB intro. I downloaded a fresh Chromium build (a development version of the Google Chrome web browser) to try it out, and have to say that I was quite impressed – the thing runs really smoothly. Let’s hope this tech becomes available as soon as possible to all major browsers. :)
If you didn’t know yet, the Ludum Dare 48 hour game development competition is held again this weekend. In the competition the idea is to make a game using a given theme, more or less from scratch. Basically most people use some small amount basecode to start up with as there’s not really that much point to make every boring bit (like how to open a window) again every time. Besides, a little framework still has less stuff than what fine tools such as Unity3D provides you with to start with. :)
So here’s my little C++ basecode/framework for making a Ludum Dare 48 hour game development competition entry. It should be equally suitable for making some other little prototype games. You’ll need to svn checkout Irrlicht and download FMOD 3 separately. The framework is meant to be used on Windows with Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 (Express Edition is enough).
Stair Dismount™ (iPhone/iPod touch) is now in sale at $0.99, so now it’s time to grab it if you own a compatible device and you don’t have the game yet. You can’t go wrong, especially with all the updates coming soon. :-)
Stair Dismount™ for iPhone and iPod touch is soon getting a v1.2.0 update. It has already been submitted to Apple for approval to the App Store. There will be quite many updates:
OpenFeint for online leaderboards
three new scenarios
game remembers last used scenario and face
quick start button in main menu to start game immediately
Go check out www.stairdismount.com and click the gray App Store badge on the right to get the game. :-)
Also I’m very surprised to see that Game Developer Magazine made “The Game Developer 50″ article listing 50 individuals with some amount of significant work, and they actually included me as one of those! While the article correctly cites me as part of the team making first licensable mobile 3D engine (referring to X-Forge), and referring to Stair Dismount now working on iPhone … there’s an error in the info about Zen Bound. I hate taking credit for someone elses work so I have an important correction: Zen Bound has been almost solely coded by Mikko Mononen (a.k.a. Memon), including the rope simulation code which the article talked about.
Me and few others have recently posted some “Dismount Moments” photos to Facebook, as seen here for an example. These images originate from the all-new Stair Dismount, created for iPhone and iPod touch. It is of course a direct successor to the original Stair Dismount released in 2002. The game has been submitted for Apple’s approval to the App Store, so it should be available for purchasing quite soon (just a few weeks). Here’s a short introduction of what the new game is all about… Read the rest of this entry »
Here’s a little C++ utility class for splitting C strings into tokens by given separators. It’s inspired by “tokenwad” taken from Sol’s CFL3, which I have used quite a few times. This version has low memory overhead as it performs only 1-2 allocations (depending if the tokenization is done in-place or a separate copy is needed).
So, my Twitter account is jlauha. I configured the blog posts to be automatically updated there, so that’s one way to follow my stuff if you’re into that. We’ll see if I start occasionally posting something else as well.
Sometimes there’s a need to embed some little bit of binary data in the executable. The reasons may vary – perhaps it is for a resource you want to exist even if data files are missing, or it could be even something you want to “hide” from some curious wannabe-hackers.
In the past years my typical use case was as follows. I used to make “64 KB intros” (such as this one), and for those I needed to embed a few data files to the executable as object data, so that I could exploit compression of the executable packer without writing a proper compression tool myself (such as UPX).
